Saturday, October 23, 2010

where is naija's orji?

My older siblings told me a story of a long long time ago, in my village of umuomaku, long before we set head in that land, in the days of our fathers. They said there was a very big Orji tree close to the Arunsi(gods of the heathern so to say) house, the largest tree in that neighbourhood. They said that this tree was so tall and mystical that if any indigene of that village was to by any chance lose their way in the forest or distant land and wants to get back home, they begin to see visions of that tall tree before them and it eventually leads them home. Of course i never ever saw this tree, but i was told that the tree was cut down in the 60s when christianity began to gain grounds in the village.

The moral of this is to explore what this tree signified in the life of the people, it was a beacon of hope and of course their beleif in it helped them to get home. It calls to my mind a parallel with Nigeria of today and the diasporan Nigerans. What would be a beacon of hope for the diasporans to go back home? Will it be the dilapidated infrastructure, worse than it was when they left or the hopelessness of the situation with politcians helping themselves to the coffers of the treasury and stealing everybody blind, or will it be the endemic corruption in the fabric of the society or the incessant stories of kidnappers/ men of the underworld terrorizing innocent citizens or the myriad of bombings which has turned the latest fad in the society or everybody agitating for one thing or the other with force as the means to get to their end or will it be those that have looted us blind before, coming back to seek rulership at the detriment of the people who they seek to rule. who will save my dear country Nigeria from the grip of these wickedness. where is the Orji of today to draw the people far away back to the land they so long to see.

guess it behoves me and others to think not of what our country can do for us but that which we can do for our country, a quote from the famous words of President JF Kennedy.